Pages

I might have fed my kids cupcakes for dinner last week but who would stay up till 12:03am baking cookies before going to bed because they wanted cranberry chip cookies for breakfast. I've excepted the fact that I'm not superwoman or even Mrs.Fields but at least my kids make me feel like I am and the cookies were awesome!

Reality: Yes, but those hamburgers you like to gobble down are actually much worse. A report by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization cited livestock, and especially beef, as a major source of greenhouse gas, generating more than transportation.

Meat accounts for 18% of the greenhouse gases the world produces every year, compared with 13% for vehicles. Other studies put that percentage even higher.

"Beef is the biggest ecological no-no," says Anna Lappe, author of Diet for a Hot Planet and a board member of the Rainforest Action Network. "Cattle require the most feed to produce a pound of meat, and as ruminants, the animals emit methane gases during digestion." -- D.T.

What happens when your 3 year old takes a black sharpie marker and draws a custom 3ftx6ft mural to the custom white cabinets?

Well after the shock there was the panic when I look in every cupboard and realized I was out of Bon Ami for those who have never heard of this amazing 120 year old product I posted about it a back in January when the incident happened but have since realized when I re-tell the nightmarish permanent marker story no one I know has ever heard of Bon Ami cleaner.

I love love love it and have used it since my high school architectural drawing class to remove ink from our drawing mat.

It's a white powder like ajax in a sense but much kinder and eco-friendly and won't scratch any surface just be careful not to rub to hard on a painted surface or the paint will start to rub off. I also use it to get marks off the faces of American Girl dolls, scuffs of patent leather shoes, the dirt off toys, leather, sinks, toilets pretty much anything and everthing!

Yes that's me with the perfect smiles as I use their product and who would smile when using a product that can tackle a sharpie marker.

This was the first week of soccer and it wasn't me crying in the parking watching my 5 year old boy play because I was laughing too hard.

AP has been watching his big sisters play for years and waiting for his turn and after an emotional break down over what shirt was cool enough for him wear we made our way to the soccer fields where he nervously walked over to his new coach said hi and then he began to run with the soccer ball as far as my eyes could see and I don't wear glasses and on his way back from circling the cosmos he fell and came to me asking why the stupid shin guards didn't keep his knees from hurting when he fell.

Once practice started the girls and I went to watch from the warm car like all good completely unprepared for the weather mothers would and here's where I saw AP take control of the soccer ball and ran the other direction with the whole team following his lead and it was from the car that we watched him fall face first and the coach pick the grass out from between his teeth my little warrior was a little shaken and afraid to get hurt again so we watched as AP would run half way down the field stop, start cheering and clapping for his teammates and jump up and down when they scored a goal on the opposite side of the field.

It was the cutest funniest thing I had ever seen and AP loved every minute of it! I can't wait for next weeks laugh session, I mean practice.

I didn't take any picture of AP playing soccer yet but here a few I found of some cute and funny animals playing.

If you want to be the Mom who has homemade cookies waiting when your kids get home from school but don't have 2 hours to spend in the kitchen this is my secret way I bake cookies for the kids twice a week and it only takes 15 minutes.

All you need is a pizza pan. I use a Calphalon anodized aluminum that I season with butter so the cookies don't stick to the bottom.

I use a Kitchen Aid mixer and first mix the butter, sugar, cinnamon , salt and baking soda then I add the flour and eggs and chips , takes about 3 minutes. After the batters ready take the homemade batch of cookie dough and spread it 3/4 around the pan leaving room for the dough to expand when it cooks.

I bake my cookies at 370 degrees for 12 minutes then let them cool on a wire rack in the pan 0-5 minutes. We never wait for them to cool but if you make a chewy or very moist cookie wait the 5 minutes for them to cool.

Cut with a pizza cutter into even squares it ends up to be about 30 , then use a spatula to remove cookies from the pan and serve.

I only bake cookies in my pan , I have found other foods cooked in the same pan will cause the cookies to absorb different flavors from the foods. Washing the pan in a dishwasher will cause the cookies to stick, you could use a non-stick pan but I prefer a well seasoned pan over non-stick.

I bake oatmeal cookies the same way but they take me about 5 more minutes in prep time with my recipe.

My Chocolate chip cookies recipe:

2 cups sifted flour

2 sticks butter

1/2 cup white sugar

1 cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon salt

3 teaspoons cinnamon

1 whole egg and 1 egg yolk

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 tablespoons milk (optional I only add it on a day it really dry and cold outside)

Bake 350 degrees exactly 12 minutes in a pizza pan or for individual cookies on a sheet pan 8-9 minutes.

Another favorite thing the kids love is to top the cookie with chocolate frosting then cut and serve.

I'm sure there's going to be thousands of blogs about going green on St. Patty's day and what better to remind everyone of the 4 R's: Reduce, reuse, recycle and replenish . (You're welcome to revisit some of my older post simply click on one of the 4 R words for the link)

Our families newest green effort is grocery shopping. We started buying only what we need to eat for three days I wonder sometimes what guests think when they get water out of the fridge and all they see are eggs, cheese and butter, I even wonder if we need a fridge at all, if only we were allowed to have chicken in the neighborhood and cut out or consumption of cow's milk cheese since cow pollute more than planes, trains and autos combined in a given year,the most important non-CO2 greenhouse gas is methane, and the number one source of methane worldwide is animal agriculture. I've been a vegetarian for 22 years and my family went meatless about a year ago.

and when it comes to grocery bags we either bring a reusable bag or carry the food out bag-less , it's no biggie if you're only buying a few days worth and a stroller helps.

I try not to buy prepackaged food items like drink boxes or single serve anything, it's just as easy to come home and do it ourselves. I empty everything into reusable containers and but the cardboard boxes in the recycling bins and any plastic packaging I bring to recycle at the local grocery store, most have plastic bag recycling bins out front. The grocery store has been my biggest challenge yet, it's much harder to reduce things when you don't have then options of bulk food or joining a co-op and buy organic food, it's getting easier and 75% of ore meals are homemade , now if I could figure out how to work the pasta attachment on the mix we'd be almost there. Maybe that'll be my next post.

Easters bunny comes in less than three weeks and just in time to check out my cupcake blog for some great Easter cupcake recipe ideas, we just finish stuffing our faces with Chocolate egg filled cupcakes from week 20.

If you saw someone or something pink and fuzzy around midnight trimming bushes and gardening by moonlight it's not me Monday who went out only to pull the garbage can and recycling to the curb but found themselves compelled to pull every weed in the garden and cut all the dead limps and over growth with giant scissors in the middle of the night and the woman dressed in a pink cookie monster robe to sore to move won't tell you who it was either.

Want to know a secret about my kitchen sink? well so did I for 18 months I searched for an answer to my dilemma , my once beautiful rustic copper farmhouse sink was turning GREEN I tried everything I could to remove the hideous color over taking not only my sink but my love of copper.

I started keeping the lights down to hide it's gross appearance and spend hours on the internet trying to find a cure abut there was nothing out there.

How can that be, no cure for the green? hadn't people been using copper sinks and tubs for hundreds of years? there must be a cure right? and when I was at my lowest about to give up on the sink and take out the copper cleaner until it shined like never before, it came to me....

Months before I had taken the butcher block wax from Williams-Sonoma(Beekeeper's gold) and rubbed on the sink , I noticed some green came off but thought nothing of it since I

wasn't going to use a $12 container of wax every other day on a sink .

Then it hit me about 11:53pm, I ran in the kitchen took out some regular beeswax and rubbed it on the sink but nothing happened.

So then I took mineral oil(the other ingredient in the Beekeeper's Gold) and began to rub it all over the sink , I had nothing to lose at this point and then heavens opened up , just kidding, but to my amazement the green rubbed off and kept coming off ......30 paper towels later my sink suddenly looked as good as the day it was installed.

Kids let's learn about buddhism.... Yeah, I loved learning about Buddy-ism and how to get along with my brothers and sisters! A 9 year-old's point of view is still so pure and innocent. So okay I guess we'll start there and work into the eightfold path later.

and they sang..... There was an old lady who lived in a shoe and had so many children she didn't know what to do.

Growing up there was a wonderful lady who had so many children, my role model and grandmother who had 16 kids in her shoe by age 42. She was brave and amazing she'd take us to this same park back in the 80's and as we played on the slide we sing the same nursery rhyme.

..... back then we thought anyone who drove a car was old and she was probably the only women that could handle raising 16 kids with the right amount of attention, respect and discipline.

Subscribe To

Follow by Email

Search This Blog

Loading...

Like us on Facebook

There was an error in this gadget

Welcome to my Blog!

About Us

Utopia by definition is described as a non-existent society that is intended to be viewed as considerably better than contemporary society, it's an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. The word was first used in the book Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More.

Hi everyone! I'm Kate a former career photojournalist, now lifestyle photographer/blogger by survival. My home is a major fixer upper with multiple projects happening at all times, a place where I try and craft a perfect life, amiss the reality of our incredibly poor financial situation and the daily challenges of raising 4 children alone.